Well this part has not gone as planned.  Given that it's been two years since I last did any touring, I've lost track of where I put some things.  For instance, my rain cap for my helmet.  I searched every bike bag in the house along with the pockets of all of my rain coats.  Or so I thought.  Turns out the kayak pullover that I use as a rain coat has a pocket on the arm that I had forgotten about and that's where the helmet cover was hiding.  Once I had that located I thought it was just a matter of packing stuff into bags and checking things off my comprehensive packing list.

I decided to go for one more shakedown ride yesterday.  I recently swapped to a Marathon GT365 in the rear after discovering that the marathon greenguard I had on there had a bad wire bead, hence the thunk thunk as I rode down the road.  I happened to notice last week that my hill climbing was harder than normal and felt like the brakes were on and I wanted to check how much better the new brake pads I installed Friday were.  Things did feel better this week and I was happy to have that part all taken care of.  

When I got home I washed up the bike in preparation for packing it into the suitcase.  After supper I went out to start packing things up and discovered my rear tire was flat.  It was getting pretty dark and I was tired and really ticked about the tire so I sort of packed up the bike and left the tire for the next morning.  I also discovered wear marks on the sidewalls from where it appears the rear derailleur is rubbing too.  That is a potential issue with 20" wheels and 11-34 cassettes.  I thought I had sufficiently checked that, but clearly not.

Fast forward to the next morning at 5am when I woke up stressing about that rear tire.  I ended up laying in bed for 3 hours trying to decide if I needed to swap to a different tire or replace the derailleur with a Shimano Sora medium cage which still has the range to handle most all of my gears.  That decision ended up being an easy one.  While I can source the derailleur in time, nowhere in the area sells an accompanying shifter.  

After breakfast I pulled the tube out.  The puncture was actually on the rim side right around where the nipples attach to the rim, not the tire side.  The local bike shop confirmed that it was likely an issue with the nipples and suggested ditching the Schwalbe rim tape and replacing it with thicker Velox cloth rim tape.  While I had the wheel pulled apart I also swapped the marathon gt 365 for a spare marathon greenguard 1.75 I had from a previous trip.  I put the whole bike back together so I could verify that the derailleur has sufficient clearance with the tire.  It does appear to be okay.  What probably was happening was that the derailleur was hitting the wheel in the lowest gear and that may have been what was slowing me down on hills.  So, in the end the blown tube was likely a blessing.  I could have ended up bombing down hills in Italy with a rubbing derailleur and insufficient rim tape.  I also took the opportunity to drill out the rim to take a Schrader valve to match the front rim.